Up
until now, there have been certain assumptions made in this column about how
humans become robots. People experience
sensory distortion living in modern technological environments. This sensory distortion is created by the
vacuum and tension pocket fields of experience in which they live. Vast expanses of understimulating vacuum
filled with overstimulating pockets of bundles of abrasive disconnected
clashing figures. In modern
technological environments, the grounding created by nature and traditional
living environments was gradually lost as were the organic stimuli that people
were built to absorb. In the human march
to control nature in order to fight back against organic perishability, people
increasingly lost the opportunity to commune with nature. Initially creating vacuum environments was
synonymous with creating safe environments: modern architecture and sterile
minimalistic interiors and frictionless machine operations. Increasingly, as people have started to feel
more and more numb in vacuum environments, they have tried to purposely create
certain overstimulating tension pocket experiences to pull out of the numbness:
venues with loud abrasive electric guitar music and strobe lights, motorcycles
and racing cars as well as free love and certain recreational drugs like coke,speed
and heroin. And when people have felt
too overstimulated they would always bounce back to a vacuum experience of
their own creation: white noise machines, yoga, meditation and other drugs like
pot and downers. People could bounce
back and forth between these two extremes in a vain attempt to achieve some
kind of greater stimulus balance of the kind that humans had when they were
still living closer to nature and in more traditional living environments.
Another
major way that a person could achieve that balance of stimulation was to use
technology to directly create an experience with more of a sensory balance:
namely the screen reality experiences of movies, television, video games,
computers, smartphones and tablets.
Also, the experience of robots. A
robot was able to survive the sensory extremes of the modern technology
external world reality in which it existed by living off of the technological
stimulation that surrounded it. By absorbing both the defined discrete stimuli
of the electricity upon which it operated and the seeming lack of stimuli
which, in truth, is the infinity vacuum stimuli from when the electricity turns
off. And the robot expresses itself with
defined discrete angular activity when it’s moving, alternating with vacuum
pauses, sometimes just micropauses, when it switches direction, intensity or
activity.
Again
there was an assumption in my model that people started to unconsciously
imitate robots as a way of dealing with the sensory distortion that came from
overstimulating tension pockets and/or an understimulating vacuum. But recently I have come to realize that not
all modern technological living environments are plagued by sensory
extremes. They have enough of a balance
between vacuum spaces and free-floating figures to provide an intensity of
stimulation that approximates the intensity to be found in most traditional
more natural living environments.
In
particular, in talking about these more sensorily balanced modern technological
living environments, I am not talking about a living environment where people
physically immerse themselves in an external world reality living
environment. Instead, I am talking about
technological living environments in which people immerse themselves mentally. In other words, I am talking about screen
reality living environments: movie theaters, televisions, video games,
computers, smartphones and tablets. With
computers, smartphones and tablets, we have the numbing vacuum effects of the
mediating screen balanced out by the abrasive stimulation of the large bundles
of data and information, the violence web sites and the pornography. The screen in the screen reality provides a
constant base (I can’t really call it a grounding that bonds). The content that appears on the screen
provides a vacuumized narrative of free-floating figures interacting and
clashing with one another and unfolding and transforming sometimes by
themselves and sometimes as a result of the interaction with the
viewer/participant human. But because
the combination of the screen and the content provides an intensity level of
stimulation that is comfortable and somewhat more easily absorbable than the
patterns of stimuli normally found in the technological external world, people
become addicted to their screens.
The
major problem with these more advanced modern technological living
microenvironments provided by screen reality equipment is to be found not in
the intensity of stimulation that they provide, but rather in the quality of
stimulation they provide. The problem is
that there is a paucity of the flowing blendable continual stimuli, organic
stimuli, necessary to keep people functioning properly as animals. Without these flowing blendable continual
stimuli from natural sources, people absorb the balance of defined discrete
stimuli and infinite vacuum stimuli in their technological living environments
and gradually start to mold themselves after the technological complex
behavioral entities that surround them – the computers and the robots.
Again, this is the result
of feeling a need to escape the sensory extremes of the modern technological
external world and cling to the oasis of a balanced technological model,
leading to a gradual imitation of the complex behavioral entities – the computers
and the robots – that humans today see as a solution to the problem of the
sensory distortion provided by the modern technological external living
environments.
However, escaping sensory
distortion is only one of the reasons that humans today model themselves after
computers and robots. Another is that
there are few if any positive sources of organic stimuli, of flowing blendable
continual stimuli to move towards. So
people simply gravitate towards the one category of sensorily balance experience
that is available: the sources of screen reality.
If we want to fight
robotization, we have to find a way for people to be able to experience more
different sources of organic stimuli. So
they can gradually start to pull away more from the negative influences of all
the different sources of screen reality.
© 2019 Laurence Mesirow
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